Here’s the Celtics Four-Point Play to appear every Wednesday on Sports of Boston. This is where I will compile four (4) small and related Celtics facts and offer my own spin on a variety of Celtics news stories. The general format will be a short blurb about the story first, then my reaction tabbed underneath it.

1. Paul Pierce, Kendrick Perkins, and Rajon Rondo have ALL shaved their heads in order to match fellow starters Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen. It remains to be seen whether the hair-style (or lack thereof) is permanent. Coach Doc Rivers on bald players:

“I love that stuff. I think it’s good when guys do that. But at the end of the day you’ve still got to play basketball. Nobody cares how we look.”

I can’t imagine a bald Pierce. He’s gonna look so weird. I think Perk is gonna look really tough. I mean, he’s a tough guy…but with a bald head to boot? Pretty amazing. Rondo has a small head, and without hair its now even smaller.

This reminds me of the 2003 MLB playoffs when the Red Sox all shaved their heads except Nomar (he was getting married) and Manny (he was being Manny). They were all so ugly…hopefully shaved heads look better on Pierce, Perk, and Rondo.

2. Counting down….we are less than 3 days away from the first Celtics preseason game. The game is Saturday October 6 at 2:30 PM on the new CSNE (Comcast Sports New England, replacing Fox Sports Net). The C’s will be facing the Raptors in Rome, Italy.

The preseason is FINALLY here! This is exciting. I’ve been blogging since early-mid August (I know to others in the blogosphere that’s not that long yet) and I have become attached to the team. The level of anticipation is through the roof. So much so, that I can’t even get a ticket. That’s a story for later…

3. Today in practice, the bald starting 5 went 0-2 against the white team (no not just Scal, but the second team). Tony Allen said this about the second team’s success:

“I just think when you step between the white lines you’ve got to be ready to play. We took advantage of that today and got the victories. Hopefully we’ll come back tomorrow with the same intensity.”

Scal on the second team:

“We had good chemistry today. Eddie knows I can go left wing, I can go reverse, I can go to the post, and now he has options. I think he felt limited at first, but once we started getting into the offense, [House] is a big time threat and [Tony] Allen coming through on the post, it gives us more options. As good as the Green team is, we need to have options to win, and that’s what we had today.”

I guess this can happen sometimes; it means our bench is deeper than some think. But like Allen Iverson said, we’re talking bout practice. Not the game. Not the game, that he lives for. Practice. It’s true. It’s the early days of training camp. As long as the first team can win real regular season games then I’ll be happy despite what they do in practice.

4. I’ve probably made comments before about this, but I’m still furious about not being able to get tickets. Mass. Governor Deval Patrick has been motioning to make ticket scalping legal, which could make purchasing them at face value difficult.

I understand why he’s moving towards the law, which makes scalpers get licenses to sell tickets. But, I feel that I have no shot of ever getting tickets at face value now. More and more scalpers are going to emerge, knowing they can make a huge profit. All they have to do is get the tickets early, or have connections to get tickets. This makes them that much harder to acquire.

With the Celtics 180-degree turnaround, tickets to C’s games at the TD BankNorth Garden have been as hard to come by as tickets to Fenway or Gillette. Is this a new Celtics Nation? Is it comparable to Red Sox Nation? No, not by a long shot…but it’s closing in.

(Special thanks to Celtics.com’s Peter Stringer for his continuous Euroblog while the C’s are overseas. It’s really cool to read and really informative.)